Radio Dada

It would take a miracle. Maybe I’m not unlovable or unworthy of love. For the right person, any amount of effort, any effort, felt right & reciprocated. Shame ebbed, and it became easier to dodge shame traps and come home to each other. That was home. Not a place, not a time, not an identity, the two of us more than the sum of our parts together. And our little dog, too. That’s not a kind of thing one can pin down and search for. And maybe there can be only one. Only one person in a lifetime ...

Dear Ollie: brainsplosion du jour

January 19, 2022 16:56 - 20 minutes - 18.7 MB

Pain makes me grumpy. I get misanthropic around high-stakes conversations. Underneath every complaint is an unmet need. I’m triggered to an overtired earlier version of me who resents having to be the adultier adult or fall back on whining or making others feel guilty or bad or sorry for me in order to get my needs met. Basic, basic needs, access needs. I’m sick of explaining, it wastes my time. People play keep-away with doing the right behaviours by insisting I prove to their satisfaction m...

Dear Ollie: goin’ back to cali

January 17, 2022 17:24 - 35 minutes - 32.9 MB

I want alone time. I think even extroverts and neurotypicals — everyone wants, at some point in their day or week, time to themselves. Maybe if only to poop, or shower. Time to ourselves to be ourselves. Yet this is a luxury devoutly to be wished, won be massing enormous amounts of money or privilege or both, in order to carve out a space for oneself. I need profound amounts of it to self-regulate. I have precious little privacy with disability, doctor’s visits, applications and recertificati...

Dear Ollie: persistent social & communication difficulties on parade

January 16, 2022 16:41 - 1 hour - 91.5 MB

My brain eats itself. I trepan my skull to let bloody words pour out until it alleviates the pressure on my brain. Maybe after, I might be able to bear contact with neurotypicals (or at least neurotypical-conforming human behaviours) without having a total raving meltdown. All my social batteries are drained by enforced contact with people who seem to have become illiterate by allowing reading/writing parts of the brain to atrophy whilst overworking the charm/social dominance muscle group. Wi...

Dear Ollie: I need someone I can trust to listen

January 15, 2022 16:37 - 49 minutes - 22.6 MB

People learn how to talk and don’t learn how to stop. How to listen. This makes everyone frantic to be heard. Even if I model good active listening, I’m taken advantage of and don’t get the same in return. We’re creating the very frantic noise we’re struggling to be heard over. If we weren’t so reactive and defensive it wouldn’t be this Cold War of verbal battery and arms reaches. If we could actually stand to be wrong, and forfeit a rap battle to declare truce and risk connection… now I soun...

Dear Ollie: what’s true for you?

January 15, 2022 04:33 - 12 minutes - 6.02 MB

Not rare, not fun meltdown re: either help or don’t, but I am as human as you. I’m not going to help you feel better, nor force you to feel bad, all I ask is that you choose based on who you want to be in this moment. We are our choices. Make it a good one. Oh, I long to be an RSC thespian who could, in iambic pentameter, unfold my deepest soul instead of strut and fret my moment in someone’s attention. I long to freestyle my aria, my testament to my pain without dealing with adolescent inter...

Dear Ollie: talking practice, surfing chronic pain

January 14, 2022 17:37 - 28 minutes - 26.7 MB

I’d love to connect with people who aren’t knock-down drag-out exhausting. I reject the idea that we’re only alive to work and hurt. This is not enough. If I’m living in the most beautiful place in the world but so dissociated with stress and unbearable pain that I can barely even see anything outside my bubble of agony, what the hell is the point? Holy forking shirtballs, THIS is the Bad Place. Where I SHOULD be happy, and glad to live in a place that’s warm with abundant fruit and dogs and ...

Dear Ollie: fear

January 13, 2022 16:16 - 21 minutes - 19.9 MB

Facing down fears together with someone else makes them less. We are more than the sum of our parts together, when we are connected. When we take a leap into faith together, let go of needing to win or control, see our difficulties as things we face together. Like jumping down a hole to help out a friend stuck there, because we’ve been down there before and know the way out. Do you remember? Do you remember a time you were down a hole, and all the help you got was prayers, platitudes, and pre...

Dear Ollie: disconnect

January 12, 2022 16:54 - 14 minutes - 6.59 MB

Gave it my best shot. I imagine death so much it feels more like a memory. Time to be rolling on.

Dear Ollie: better out than in (I guess)

January 12, 2022 04:59 - 20 minutes - 9.61 MB

Orientation: political + apolitical. Antipolitical? Possibly alien. I still love John Glover Surprise, where the actor suddenly appears out of nowhere in something I’m watching. It’s like being run over by a stampede of golden retriever puppies. Can I explain why? Nope! Do I care? Hell no! I’ll never look gift joy in the mouth.

Dear Ollie: warming up the brain engine before setting out.

January 10, 2022 17:09 - 22 minutes - 10.3 MB

“Yup.”

Dear Ollie: persistent social & communication difficulties

January 09, 2022 17:39 - 47 minutes - 21.8 MB

Moral of the story: be a buddy, and get a buddy. In-person support means absolutely everything to someone like me. I’m not alone in feeling like this. All well and good to tell someone “you’re not alone,” but don’t tell — SHOW. Show up to show me I’m not alone. We make time for what and who is important to us. That’s how we show what and who we value — what we choose to spend our valuable time and attention on. Showing up is important. So important. It’s risky, but what isn’t? It’s hard somet...

Dear Ollie: trying to pull meaning from MAAAADNESS

January 08, 2022 17:01 - 25 minutes - 11.7 MB

I feel like I would feel significantly less insane and incomprehensible if I weren’t aware of how mad I sound. If I weren’t so self-conscious. If I had what Kim Rhodes described as ‘an audience that has your back.’ Maybe self-awareness is its own trap. People who are self-ignorant seem to get along fine, albeit with periodic epic pouting about not understanding why people sometimes just snap and go crazy or up and leave. But then forgetting the next moment and running out to play again. Secur...

Dear Ollie: words words words

January 07, 2022 17:53 - 37 minutes - 34.6 MB

Talking, even to myself, values my voice and my words. Sharing my words is frightening but for a while there, podcasting was the only way I kept in practice communicating verbally. The trouble is, talking to someone whose responses remind me why I silenced myself tends to broom-handle my bicycle spokes of progress. Kershnoogle my senses and my words, and my courage to communicate. Scrambles my brains, fills it with all the onions that make me sick, and force-feeds it back to me. I wind up fee...

Dear Ollie: I need a miracle

January 05, 2022 16:25 - 1 hour - 66.6 MB

In the age of suck. Sucking and draining away every bit of ourselves and each other. Maybe today I can force myself to try to talk to a librarian. Maybe not start out with the housing thing. I need someone to talk to who can hear me. And not waste my time. Someone to whom I am a whole adult person. I’m looking for a mind that works, in a junkyard of ruined prefrontal processors.

Dear Ollie: I don’t know

January 02, 2022 16:58 - 33 minutes - 15.6 MB

If I have to pay people to listen, it sort of sucks. Plus hiring people to listen tends to give them unearned confidence in the value of their unsolicited opinions. I’m not buying your words, I’m buying your time. If you want to pour words in me I want to be paid for my time. Or refunded. Mostly what I want is to hire a translator, a liaison, a spokesperson. A buffer between me and other people, someone excellent at both listening and speaking. Someone who mostly listens to me and talks TO ot...

Dear Ollie: monologues about dialogues

January 01, 2022 15:59 - 38 minutes - 35.4 MB

I’m not going to learn new skills in verbal self-defense or practice them well on my own, any more than a punching bag teaches me how to fight off an attacker. I can practice using my words, but I wind up over-explaining on here, and thinking our loud, and that’s one of the things I want to replace with, more simply, “stop. time out. No.” It should not be this hard. When my right to say no is entirely hypothetical, it’s crazy-making.

Dear Ollie: nope to the capitalism

December 31, 2021 16:43 - 53 minutes - 49.4 MB

Gods, it’s worse than cocaine. It gets everywhere. I think it’s even in the water. Whether we like it or not, everyone’s drinking the Kool-aid.

Dear Ollie: in the right environment I thrive

December 30, 2021 15:43 - 52 minutes - 48.6 MB

With the right listener I speak. With open hearts I open. With the right support I rise. Does that even exist anymore? Is it accessible? How do I find it? How will I know?

Dear Ollie: everything is broken

December 27, 2021 16:13 - 32 minutes - 30 MB

Especially moi.

Dear Ollie: give people housing

December 27, 2021 15:36 - 5 minutes - 4.93 MB

My whole life all I ever wanted was a safe place to live. It’s only unreasonable when people overcomplicate it with reasons that ignore the real issue: everyone deserves a safe place to live. Every human. No exceptions. If housing is taken care of, a lot of things improve. Mental health, addiction, abuse — if we were guaranteed, each of us, a safe place to live, then we could work on how we want to live. Housing and food, forever, for everyone. No excuses, no questionnaires, no financial scru...

Dear Ollie: how do you start it over?

December 27, 2021 14:12 - 31 minutes - 29.1 MB

I don’t care much for picking up and moving, but I need to be accepted and enough as I am. I never thought I’d be this alone and this far out of my mind, struggling even to communicate with minds like NORAD bunkers. I’m not trying to cheat anyone, I’m trying to live, honestly, with integrity. But paranoia and fear-based reactions tend to block any other choices but ones that reinforce the fear, justify the paranoia after the fact. Treat people like criminals, deny them rights and pathways to ...

Dear Ollie: Unconvertable

December 27, 2021 04:21 - 12 minutes - 5.59 MB

Never before has someone been more unconvertable in every way; and forever, that’s how I’ll stay. —Live your values and people will follow you. Speak values, but in practice fail, deny and defend failure, and persist in living some other values, and I personally will ragequit. Y’all do what you like. If that capitalist Kool-aid comes out though, I’ll be bookin’ it to anywhere but here. Frak that.

Dear Ollie: achy fatigue

December 22, 2021 16:07 - 19 minutes - 8.82 MB

People are straight-up exhausting.

Dear Oliver: the end of the movie

December 20, 2021 08:05 - 26 minutes - 12.1 MB

If you find somebody to love in this world, you better hang on tooth and nail — but I guess it doesn’t matter anymore.

Dear Ollie: wellllll… shit

December 18, 2021 16:58 - 8 minutes - 4.16 MB

Atmospheres of invalidation, interrogation about details, hyper-controlling conversations, excessive questioning, monologuing with a lot of ‘you-statements,’ trying to explain basic concepts of ‘we don’t know how each other thinks/feels’ — a rank slice of crazy-making. It’s a trap. It infests, and festers. People wonder why sensitive, thoughtful people need significant time alone. This is why. Not all people are like this, but the ones that are tend to be relentless with this crap. Like they ...

Dear Ollie: I’m so tired

December 17, 2021 15:21 - 1 minute - 762 KB

Listening was never an option.

Dear Ollie: that mean, mean green

December 15, 2021 17:10 - 21 minutes - 9.97 MB

Almighty dollar. Must be funny in a rich man’s world. If I were a rich man… it gives options, but illusions aplenty, and carries so many costs. It can cost a love, a soul, a life, health, so much wasted time. Time isn’t money; you can’t buy back time, and time alone isn’t for sale, and some people’s time is unavailable at any price. The measurement of time, like the measurement of relative value, are human creations, and risky reductive ones. Sin starts with treating people as things. Money g...

Dear Ollie: there’s no justice, there’s just us

December 14, 2021 16:31 - 45 minutes - 41.9 MB

Radically accept that some things can’t be done. Some things can’t be changed. So: adapt or move on. My leaps into faith are getting weaker. My courage is eroding. My hope is long gone. My uncertainty I’ve been using in place of hope (I don’t know everything) is not cutting the mustard either. Apanthropy is the desire to be away from other people and to be left alone. ‘Tis a consummation, devoutly to be wished. And a high-priced luxury. Despite the high cost of living it’s amazing how popular...

Dear Ollie: home should feel safe

December 12, 2021 16:55 - 13 minutes - 12.2 MB

I hate it when people think calling a space ‘safe’ will make me feel safe. Like saying ‘I love you’ doesn’t make me feel loved if I don’t already feel that way. And saying ‘you can trust me’ doesn’t engender trust. Telling me to ‘calm down’ might cause me to stop expressing how I feel, but it doesn’t change how I feel. Sometimes nothing in the world is more scary than ‘don’t be afraid.’ If other people have discomfort about my emotions and how I express them; they can take a time-out to deal ...

Dear Ollie: what

December 09, 2021 06:57 - 8 minutes - 4.06 MB

Yup. What.

Dear Ollie: wealth of rain, dearth of courage

December 06, 2021 16:32 - 22 minutes - 21 MB

C’est la c’est.

Dear Ollie: of homelessness, invisibility, autistic burnout, Majora’s Mask, & sundry

December 05, 2021 17:19 - 18 minutes - 16.9 MB

My hangover has covered the world with cold damp fog. I must shower, at the very least. I want that doorknob changed. I’m sick of not having boundaries in the place where I live. How is this so hard? Will I ever have a place of true safety and rest, with friends who get me, who would be horrified how long this went on, how quickly people turned their heads and looked away? Are such hypothetical friends elsewhere having similar dehumanising experiences, wondering if they’ll ever meet someone w...

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